Chapter 6 #2
The library's the nicest room in the house—two floors of dark shelves, a ladder on a rail, the good clean smell of paper cutting under everything.
Killian trails in after me, bored now, no audience value in watching a guy dust books, and drifts along the far wall picking things up and putting them down wrong.
There’s a feather duster in the corner in a whicker basket and I get to work.
Shelf by shelf, book by book, I work my way through the room.
There are more books in here than I've seen in one place in my life. I dust the low shelves and climb the ladder for the high ones on slightly shaky legs. By the time I’m done with the shelves, the light through the tall windows fades the rest of the way.
My arms are done. My legs quit a while ago. I’m exhausted but hopeful that I’m almost done for the day.
Killian loses interest fast. He drifts—pulls a book out, drops it on a table, wanders the far end, checks his phone. At some point I stop tracking where he is.
I get to a little side table by a leather reading chair.
There's a heavy silver picture frame, turned away from me, toward the seat. I pick it up to dust under it, tip it toward the light—and the photograph catches my eye.
A woman.
I don't mean to stop but she catches my eye.
She's beautiful in a way that puts an ache in my chest I didn't ask for—soft, warm, gold-lit, laughing at whoever's behind the camera.
There's a pull low in me when I look at her, quiet and strange, like some part of me recognizes something the rest of me can't place.
I've never seen her. I'm sure of it. But I stand there holding the frame, unable to put it down, and the feeling settles into something certain: whoever she was, she was like me.
She was an omega.
Then I catch the eyes. It takes me a second, and then it lands—they're Calder's. That same cool green, the exact set of them. And once I see it the rest comes with it: something of Killian in the jaw, in the shape of the smile.
Her boys.
This is their mother.
I blow out a breath.
She's nowhere else in the house. Not the cold front rooms, not the halls—just this, one picture, turned to face a chair in the warmest corner of the warmest room. A gentle memory in a house that feels anything but.
And I start to understand what I'm holding. Whose she was. What it means that she lives nowhere in this whole house except right here, in a frame, turned toward an empty chair—
"Put it down."
Killian’s voice cracks across the room and I flinch so hard the frame jumps out of my hands.
Time slows as the picture falls and slams on the floor.
The sound is huge in all that quiet. The glass cracks and then scatters, a long bright tinkle of pieces skidding across the hardwood and settling. The frame lands face down in the middle of it, her picture pressed to the floor, glass fanned out around the edges.
For a second nobody moves. I don't breathe.
Then I make myself look up.
Killian's standing in the middle of the room wearing an expression I've never seen on him. Not the grin. Not the lazy contempt. Something white and stripped and terrible.
"Do you know what you just did?" He comes toward me slow, and the whole air changes with him, copper-and-smoke gone scorched, alpha-fury thick enough to choke on.
"I–I'm sorry—" My heart's already out of control, slamming and skipping, the gray flooding in from pure fear. "I didn't know, I was only dusting, I didn't mean—"
"Stop." One word, flat, and it shuts my mouth like a hand over it.
He crosses the rest of the way and crouches over the wreck. He doesn't touch it. Just looks.
“Killian, I’m–”
"Get away from her." Quiet. Even. He doesn't look up at me when he says it.
He doesn't say more. And that's when I see it: this isn't anger. It was never anger. His eyes are bright and furious and wet, his hands are shaking, and whatever's tearing through him has nothing to do with me and everything to do with the woman in the broken frame.
"Who… who is she?" I ask, before I can think better of it. Barely a whisper.
His eyes flick to mine and I realize I’ve said the wrong thing.
He's on me in a stride, a fist in my shirt hauling me up onto my toes, his face an inch from mine. "Don't." Low and shaking. "Don't you say one more word about her. You don't get to ask. You don't get to look."
Up close, breathing me in, something snags behind the rage—his nose works, his brow twitches, the fury stutters around that note it can't name—and for half a second he just stares at me, thrown, before the grief drowns it back out.
"You're gonna clean this up. Every piece. On your knees, since that's your favorite place."
He shoves me down—hard, a flat palm to my shoulder—and I drop. I try to catch myself but my hand lands right on the broken glass.
A shard drives deep into my palm. The pain is sharp and instant, a hot line straight up my wrist, and a sound almost gets out of me before I bite down on it.
When I turn my hand over there's already blood, a lot of it, welling dark and fast out of the meat of my palm.
I close my fingers over it before Killian can see.
For a second I don't move. I stay exactly where I've landed, on my knees, shoulders hunched, head low, making myself as small and still as I can. My chest is a closed fist. The room swims. My bleeding hand I keep curled under me, out of sight.
When I finally make myself move, I gather the pieces one-handed, bleeding into my fist, picking up what's left of the woman’s memory one shard at a time.
Killian doesn't help, doesn't speak. He crouches, lifts the frame out of the glass with a gentleness I didn't know was in him, and sets it back on the side table, upright, the way it was. His thumb passes over her face—the glass gone now, nothing between his hand and the picture.
"I didn't mean to," I whisper. It's true. I don't know if I'm still talking about the frame.
He doesn't respond, just stays crouched over her, not looking at me, and whatever emotion moving through him is so old and so far down that I can't follow it. But I can feel the size of it from here. It's so much bigger than a broken frame, and it scares me worse than his fists did.
He stands. Drags a hand down his face, and when he looks at me again the shutters are back down, the killer bolted into place—harder now, like he hates that I saw anything at all.
"It was an accident," I say. "I swear. I was only dusting—"
"Get out." He doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't have to. "Don't ever set foot in this room again. Don't touch anything of hers, don't look at her, don't breathe near her." His jaw flexes. "Get out. I don't want to see your face."
I scramble up so fast I nearly go straight back down, cradling my cut hand against my chest, and I get to the door and through it—
—and slam into a wall that turns out to be Vincent.
He catches me by the arms. I stumble back a step, an apology already in my throat—and then I see it. His shirt. White, pressed, and there's a smear of red across the front of it now, bright and wet, where my hand caught him.
My hand. My blood.
"I'm sorry," I choke out, backing away. "I'm sorry, I didn't—sorry."
And before he can say a word, before he can catch my hand or ask the question already forming on his face, I'm gone. Down the hall. Up the stairs on legs that shouldn't hold me, heart slamming, palm throbbing.
Into my room.
Door shut.
Back against it.
I'm going to stay up here as long as they let me. Away from the library, away from Killian, away from the blood on Vincent's shirt, away from this fucked up new life.
Away from everything.
As long as I can.